For romance we get May Britt, Fox's not-so-successful attempt at late 50's starmaking (she and Juliet Greco). Britt isn't particularly believable as an officer's tag-along wife, as Anglo military wives usually lived on bases and needed acccompaniment to tour the countryside. Saville's relationship with Britt's Kristina is no wham-bam hop in the sack situation. Appropriate to his knight-warrior trade, Saville shows a little chivalry, even to the point of decking Britt's loser husband when he gets disrespectful of her. A nice touch is having it well understood where Saville's core interest really lies. At a key moment for a romantic payoff with his buddy's wife, Saville scans the sky for jets instead.

Forgettable aviation combat films are usually crammed with repetitous scenes of planes scrambing to perform similar missions highlighted by whatever stock footage is available of the trains, roads and bridges in France or wherever being plastered from the air. Anything that doesn't build to a higher level in an action movie tends to get draggy. The Hunters has only three real flying sequences and a montage showing Saville and Pell racking up the hits. Although there's perhaps only ten minutes or so of flying in the film, it's of superior quality and every shot makes its mark in the overall picture.

The air-to-air scenes are exacting, with chase planes following choreographed moves instead of recording the usual generic peel-off and cruising scenes. Seen in such detail, we can tell that these aircraft are quite small, not much more than a primitive jet engine with a cockpit glued on top. The wings flex and the light ripples off the aluminum. On the ground, the front nose wheel hops as the pilot taxis using only his engine and his front brake. It really seems like a wild hot rod, something that might as soon blow up as give one a fast ride.

Although Sabre jets are downright poky by today's standards, in 1952 there was nothing more maneuverable and deadly in the sky, and The Hunters shows how nimble and dextrous one of these things can seem when a pilot does fancy show-off maneuvers. Even in rear-projection, a tail-gating jet is almost funny, dancing about and flirting with a mid-air collision. And if they don't look dangerous, one has to consider the fact that the shots being fired aren't machine gun bullets but larger-caliber cannon shooting at a very high rate - a short burst might send 50 white hot cannon shells at its target.

The Hunters uses a different kind of aircraft, F-84's painted blue, to represent the Russian MiGs, and although they don't look right they look different enough to suffice. There were ace MiG pilots as well, some of them said to be Russians flying as advisors to the People's Republic of North Korea.

The only egregious flub is the use of a stock shot with a totally different style of jet to represent Lt. Corona's fatal crash. I think it's an F-100 Thunderchief in the traumatic-looking footage. To help out the mismatch, the screenplay confects to have Corona's Sabre Jet not be able to drop its wing tanks before engaging the enemy. It's a visually exciting ritual when they jettison the tanks, like the Greek warriors dropping their scabbard belts to fight in Jason and the Argonauts). But it still is distracting to cut to a completely different aircraft for the crash.

The screenplay gets away with the old Dawn Patrol cliché of having not one but two jets intentionally ditch so that the pilots can rescue a comrade. This sequence tails out the movie with some standard fighting behind enemy lines stuff that The Bridges at Toko-Ri took pains to deflate; I guess an old gag that gives the audience what they want is a good gag. Director Dick Powell keeps the action simple and clear, and in general steers clear of pretension or forced meaningfulness.

The Hunters isn't one of Robert Mitchum's truly committed movies like Night of the Hunter, Ryan's Daughter or The Yakuza, but his natural persona fits the role well. It's amusing to have him play the old flier upstaged by the jive-a** punk, when in reality Mitchum was the bohemian hepcat and Robert Wagner the brylcreemed Hollywood nice boy. Richard Egan is very good as the top kick, especially when the character admits that he wears flashy six-guns to impress the hot dogs and make himself look younger. Lee Phillips was a so-so presence in Peyton Place the year before and something of a washout here, not very interesting as a drunk or much competition for Mitchum on any level.

In smaller roles are Victor Sen Yung as a friendly Korean farmer and Robert Reed and Stacy Harris as other pilots. Larry Thor plays a captain with a sour attitude; besides acting, he became a screenwriter (The Amazing Colossal Man, anyone?) and ended up a beloved film professor at UCLA.

Fox's DVD of The Hunters is a beauty, one of their 50s CinemaScope titles that translates well to enhanced widescreen DVD. The blues in the sky and the browns and reds of the Japanese landscape make a pleasant contrast, and the 4.0 surround track is active and dynamic for a film of this vintage (I think the stereo track is a theatrical original).

There's a teaser-trailer and a trailer-trailer, neither particularly good and both marred by an embarrassing theme song not heard in the film itself ... accompanied by bongoes, it's reminiscent of the Underdog theme. The other extra is a newsreel of the film's premiere, at a miserable airbase theater that must have made the visiting movie people feel like they shouldn't have bothered to dress up. That's what ya get, playing movie-footsie with the Air Force: General LeMay will want to meet all the actors!

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, The Hunters rates:
Movie: Very Good
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: teaser, trailer, newsreel clip
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: May 24, 2004